Title: An introduction to embedded contact homology
Speaker: Dan Cristofaro-Gardiner, IAS
Date: Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Time: 11:15am-12:15pm
Place: Seminar Room 313, Simons Center
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Abstract: Embedded contact homology (ECH) is a type of Floer homology for contact 3-manifolds that is isomorphic to a version of Heegard Floer homology. In the first part of my talk, I will survey the foundations of ECH. The second part will be about ECH cobordism maps. Hutchings and Taubes were able to define cobordism maps by using Seiberg-Witten theory, but there appear to be significant challenges in defining these maps by counting J-holomorphic curves.